I don't exactly remember when did we have our first dissection session. But it was quite exciting for us. We were damn enthusiastic as well as a bit doubtful of whether we would be able to stand that feeling of cutting a dead body or not. The dissection was scheduled post-lunch and we all were advised to have a full-stomach meal in order to stand in the dissection hall for two hours together. Well, we all reached the dissection hall with all the required material. Since ours was the very first batch, we saw the cleanest possible dissection hall in a medical college. And thus we could not imagine what all was there to follow.
Finally, the first cadaver was being brought, then the second, the third and so on. Dark dead bodies preserved in formaline solution. All cadavers were being placed on the respective tables. I remembered the Almighty and touched my scalpel and forceps to my head as a sign of respect to the pretty instruments. Rubber gloves, scalpel in one hand and forceps in the other, it was a damn good feeling. Somebody somewhere deep inside me felt proud of being a medical student, rather a would-be doctor.
Our instructor showed us how to make an incision on the skin of the cadaver. As I saw the instructor's scalpel running over the dark wet skin, all my enthusiasm turned into smoke. I immediately retracted my hands and folded them at my back pretending nothing happened. The view of that first incision and what I exactly felt that time is still inside me. I was afraid how would I make a cut to someone's body. Further, I didn't want to make my scalpel and forceps dirty in order to avoid washing them. (I know it sounds silly, but yes, it was what I felt) But the instructor would not let us go like this. Out of the fifteen students standing around the dissection table, he had to choose poor me for the very first time. I cursed the moment in mind and hesitantly touched the head of scalpel with the skin of the upper back taking care not to spoil it much.
That day, I made only a few incisions and nothing else. But the next day had something worse for me. The instructor told me to demonstrate the previous day's method of incision to those who didn't come that day. I abused the damn previous day's absentees and held my instruments in hand, a bit more firm this time. Gradually I started making finer movements on the old man who measured around six feet long (not tall of course, the body was lying on the table) The next day still had something worse for me. The instructor taught us how to detach the back muscles from the spine and again it was poor me who had to do all this. But I thank that moment since it was the day I left all my fear and worries regarding dissection and attained a good command over anatomy.
The not-so-good part during dissection was the foul, pungent, tearing, throat-choking smell of formaline that would sometimes make us feel nauseated, specially at times lacking electricity. The worst thing happened when we were ordered to break the thoracic cage and take out the heart and the lungs. The instructor had given us full liberty to dissect out in our own way and enjoy as much as we could. Girls, definitely resorted to talking (they only start to talk when it comes to enjoying) and one by one left the table asking us to call them back when we were finished taking out the organs. As they left, it was only Hardik and me who were left with a bone-saw to cut the ribs out. We did a lot of hard work in cutting the ribs with immense patience. We were left with a single rib to be cut and so we decided not to cut, but to break it. Katack!! And it all happened at once. Both of us were sprayed with formaline everywhere on us and each tasted the bits of muscles that flew into our mouths...yuck!! I felt so screwed up that I didn't even bother to realise that also my hand was injured a lot by the broken bone.
That was quite bad a feeling of having human flesh in mouth (neither did that taste good) I felt much more pity for Hardik, since he never tasted non-veg being a Jain (though I was also not into eating a dead man!!)
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Monday, November 1, 2010
The First Come-Back-Home
It was this day when three years ago we set to return home for the first vacations being declared on the occasion of Diwali. Around fifteen days and we all felt as if we spent years together in the hostel. With a bit of heaviness somewhere in the corner of heart, we all packed up. 1st November, 2007. It was a very special day for me since it was the housewarming ceremony of our new duplex and I was supposed to reach as early as possible.
As I already told somewhere in previous posts that our college was quiet far from the main city and so it took us almost an hour and a half in reaching the place where we could get a bus for our home, Bhopal. The taxi cabs charged us anything they wanted for taking us those 25-30 kilometers and we had to pay whatever they demanded. Finally, we came to the bus stand only to find no AC buses being scheduled up till the noon. It was around 8 am and I couldn't afford waiting in order to reach the holy 'Vaastu-Pooja' ceremony at my home. So I decided to set for the journey alone in the non-AC bus and leave Manu and other friends to take the girls later in the AC bus. But ultimately all of us set in the same non-AC bus thinking it would be fine when we all were together.
One of my pretty HS (High Society) friends sat beside me in the 2x2 seater bus. I wondered why she offered me to sit with her. The journey started with all sorts of nuisance created by the vendors both inside and outside the bus. I don't know how people tolerate those shrills that sound both comic and tragic. On the other hand I wonder how much would those vendors earn by selling a few 5-rupee items per day. Only God knows how they feed their families. Here, by my side, she put on her expensive-looking goggles and took out 'Femina' from her bag to read. I had seen people applying glasses for reading, but never the goggle-ones. I controlled my laughter by suppressing it into an idiotic grin. In between turning the magazine pages, she kept on making weird faces looking at the other passengers of the bus. (I tried to make out what made her make those faces, was that the journey or the magazine that contained models more prettier than her...?)
I was too tired of packing up the luggage and setting things quiet right and safe in the room the whole night before the journey. There I found the answer of how do people sleep in such buses? I fell fast asleep hugging the tiny soft toy, a small cow or something, that Hardik handed me up when we left from the hostel (Hardik had told me to bring it back to him from home as it was just to remind me of him in the vacations that followed.) I would have woken up around an hour later to see the bus over-packed with passengers. Manu told me that they were the passengers of some other bus that failed somehow on the way and so we all were left together to choke and boil in the same bus on that pink cold day. I felt like jumping away out of the bus. But I kept calm in order to pretend as if it mattered the least to me. My co-passenger was apparently annoyed by my comfortable naps I was able to manage in such adversities, but I couldn't help it. (Probably because she had kept on telling me just before the journey that she had never travelled in a non-AC bus and had taken some medicine for motion-sickness due to which she could fall asleep any time, and it was me, not her, who was sleeping like a monster who had never ever slept for the past 200 years together). The journey that started from our hostel, boys and girls all singing, travelling together for the very first time, ended up like being fried up in a non-stick pan.
Finally, we got down at Bhopal in around five hours and Manu's father took us to my new home so that all of us attended the final part of the ceremony, the 'Poornahuti'. The first journey seemed to be average, in terms of adventure, until one of my friends called me up to ask for the travel agency's contact number, since he had left his briefcase in the overcrowded bus that contained all his original academic documents. I thanked God for I didn't throw the ticket before his call, to forget that messy journey.
Thereafter, I threw that ticket and forgot all the discomfort we experienced that day. But still I remember those goggles 'on' to read Femina and that anti-motion sickness drug taken by my co-passenger, as a side effect of which, I slept cozy...
As I already told somewhere in previous posts that our college was quiet far from the main city and so it took us almost an hour and a half in reaching the place where we could get a bus for our home, Bhopal. The taxi cabs charged us anything they wanted for taking us those 25-30 kilometers and we had to pay whatever they demanded. Finally, we came to the bus stand only to find no AC buses being scheduled up till the noon. It was around 8 am and I couldn't afford waiting in order to reach the holy 'Vaastu-Pooja' ceremony at my home. So I decided to set for the journey alone in the non-AC bus and leave Manu and other friends to take the girls later in the AC bus. But ultimately all of us set in the same non-AC bus thinking it would be fine when we all were together.
One of my pretty HS (High Society) friends sat beside me in the 2x2 seater bus. I wondered why she offered me to sit with her. The journey started with all sorts of nuisance created by the vendors both inside and outside the bus. I don't know how people tolerate those shrills that sound both comic and tragic. On the other hand I wonder how much would those vendors earn by selling a few 5-rupee items per day. Only God knows how they feed their families. Here, by my side, she put on her expensive-looking goggles and took out 'Femina' from her bag to read. I had seen people applying glasses for reading, but never the goggle-ones. I controlled my laughter by suppressing it into an idiotic grin. In between turning the magazine pages, she kept on making weird faces looking at the other passengers of the bus. (I tried to make out what made her make those faces, was that the journey or the magazine that contained models more prettier than her...?)
I was too tired of packing up the luggage and setting things quiet right and safe in the room the whole night before the journey. There I found the answer of how do people sleep in such buses? I fell fast asleep hugging the tiny soft toy, a small cow or something, that Hardik handed me up when we left from the hostel (Hardik had told me to bring it back to him from home as it was just to remind me of him in the vacations that followed.) I would have woken up around an hour later to see the bus over-packed with passengers. Manu told me that they were the passengers of some other bus that failed somehow on the way and so we all were left together to choke and boil in the same bus on that pink cold day. I felt like jumping away out of the bus. But I kept calm in order to pretend as if it mattered the least to me. My co-passenger was apparently annoyed by my comfortable naps I was able to manage in such adversities, but I couldn't help it. (Probably because she had kept on telling me just before the journey that she had never travelled in a non-AC bus and had taken some medicine for motion-sickness due to which she could fall asleep any time, and it was me, not her, who was sleeping like a monster who had never ever slept for the past 200 years together). The journey that started from our hostel, boys and girls all singing, travelling together for the very first time, ended up like being fried up in a non-stick pan.
Finally, we got down at Bhopal in around five hours and Manu's father took us to my new home so that all of us attended the final part of the ceremony, the 'Poornahuti'. The first journey seemed to be average, in terms of adventure, until one of my friends called me up to ask for the travel agency's contact number, since he had left his briefcase in the overcrowded bus that contained all his original academic documents. I thanked God for I didn't throw the ticket before his call, to forget that messy journey.
Thereafter, I threw that ticket and forgot all the discomfort we experienced that day. But still I remember those goggles 'on' to read Femina and that anti-motion sickness drug taken by my co-passenger, as a side effect of which, I slept cozy...
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